My name is Jon Gillham I am a 33 year old, husband, father of 3 (all aged 4 and under), engineer and huge geek when it to comes to systematizing and outsourcing any business. With over 10 years in the online publisher/advertising space I try to provide my thoughts with the hope it helps people build their own business! More About Me

5 On Page SEO Mistakes to Avoid

Are you looking for a quick on page SEO check. There are many complicated On Page SEO analysis but today’s post from Gary really keeps it easy to understand breaking it down into 5 parts…

Content

Title & Descriptions

URL

Visual & Media

Internal Linking

Gary runs a successful SEO agency and as a member of the six figure challenge group provides a lot of SEO advice to the group. His site also was one of the first to start making money extremely quickly.

Even with Gary breaking it down into such an easy to understand and well layed out post the one thing I like to always remember is eventually the search engines will be good enough that they will rank the best website to answer the searchers query first so be that website!

Gary…take it away…

1. Content

Quality – Write original content that provides value to your readers. Regurgitating the same old info over and over again is pointless. Come up with a fresh idea, research it properly and produce apost that is second to none. Write it like you would like to read it. Well written content that flows will help keep the reader engaged for longer, reduce bounce rate and potentially increase your rankings.

People often talk about quality content having to be a certain length. Yeah well maybe, but its much more important for the content to be valuable to the reader. 1500 words of rubbish is still rubbish no matter what way you look at it.

Unique – Do not under any circumstances just copy text from another website. You will get hit with a duplicate content penalty for sure and its pointless anyway. It still happens all the time and I have had to clean up quite a few websites with this issue.

Relevant – Make sure what you do write is relevant to your audience. I see it time and time again. I click onto a page to read something and the content is way off what I expected it to be. This adds no value whatsoever to your reader and you probably wont see them again.

Link Magnet – A sign that you have nailed it with your content is that it gets shared around the web. People will naturally share quality information if they feel it is of value to their readers. This may be via any one of the social channels and done correctly you will no longer have to worry about link building as the work will be done for you. You will attract links from places you never even heard of – all natural, all relevant and hopefully all valuable…

Shareable – Make it easy for people to share your content. There are multiple free tools available for this. You can even customise titles and different images for each of the social platforms if you want to. A word of warning here is to watch out for plugins that inject ads into your page – you might not see them straight away but they do exist. I use SumoMe on a few of my sites because it works great and I have never had any issues.

LSI Keywords – I will not be going into any detail on keywords for this post but I will say that you should be looking at LSI (Latent semantic indexing) keywords as part of you page content strategy. Google is as you know quite smart when it comes to page content but by adding in plenty of relevant LSI keywords you are giving yourself the best chance of exposure to search traffic as possible.

An example of LSI keywords for this post would be:

Searches related to on page seo

on page seo checklist

on page seo tips

on page seo grader

on page seo steps

on page seo tutorial

on page seo techniques

on page seo techniques 2014

on page seo checker

A simple way to find these terms is to scroll to the bottom of the Google page once you run your search. They show up there because they are relevant to your term so make sure to include some of them in your content – but only if they work. Don’t try and force them in as this will take from the readers experience.

2. Title & Descriptions

A properly set up Page Title is still one of the most important factors for good on-page SEO.

Title Tag. Having a relevant title Tag (H1) tells the Search engines what you page is about. The title tag is displayed in the Search Results so make sure it stands out. It also stands out on the screen so your readers can see very quickly what the page is about. This title is also what gets picked up by Social shares such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc so keep it clear and to the point.

Length – 50 to 60 characters. Any more and your title will get chopped off with a (…) by Google

Impact on readers – A well crafted headline will be the difference between a user opening your page or ignoring it. Emotional impact really helps drive views if done in the right way. Something I want to add in here is do not use link bait type titles unless your content is suited to it because at this stage they are just annoying and I personally ignore them. – you know the ones:

‘Paddy ate a bag of coal, you should see what happened to him next…’ – who cares, next website please.

Brand – I will always where possible try to add in my company brand to the page title. This helps in brand recognition for my own company and when the content gets shared so does my company name. It might not always be possible to do this given the limitation on title length but anything to get the word out is always welcome.

Descriptions – Not so much of a big deal anymore when it comes to ranking your page but it makes all the difference when you show up in the search results. Write concise descriptions for all of your pages that you want indexed because this is what your readers see when you show up in front of them in the search results.

You can enhance this further with a small bit of Schema markup and add in stars that show up in the results page. These two things alone can make a big difference in click through rate from search. The stars draw the user to your link and the description reels them in…

If you have difficulty with this then just use something like a plugin from Yoast. It will give you warnings when you cross the line or forget something. Simple stuff but it gets forgotten all the time.

3. URL

Your page url should also make sense to both the Search Engines and to your readers.

This makes much more sense. Search Engines are smart enough to understand that your page is related to SEO and you are giving them a little extra help by configuring your URL structures correctly. Plus by using a category you are providing a platform for more pages related to your topic, which also helps increase your exposure.

You would also be surprised but it helps with gaining links as well because you have the right relevant keywords in the URL.

4. Visual

A picture tells a thousand words. A relevant one does anyway.

Having a page with carefully selected good quality relevant images adds a great deal of value to the page for the reader. Great pictures get shared all the time so make sure you take advantage of this. Pinterest is a great example of this. A website that is image rich will grab the attention of these users and more Pins/shares = more traffic.

Using images is a great way to get traffic to your website even when its brand new.

You can start to drive sales and conversions as soon as the site is online and while you are waiting and hoping that Google indexes your content and you start to rank high enough to attract organic traffic.

Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Gentlemint – the list goes on, but some serious traffic can come from these websites almost instantly.

A couple of points to make about pictures:

Keep the size as small as possible without compromising the quality. Loading a webpage with a 2Mb image is no fun for anybody. It just slows your site down which does not help you ranking potential. Use any of the image editors and trim them down to a suitable size. If using WordPress then use images that fit – don’t let WordPress auto-scale the images for you.

If you have a very image rich website you should consider using a CDN to cache everything. Make sure the CDN you use covers all the countries and markets you play in if possible.

Use Alt Tags with all your images. They have both User and SEO advantages. These tags are used by Search Engines to discover more about your page of content. They don’t understand images but by having the correct text you may well feature in image search results. Users with screen readers also take advantage of Alt Tags to tell them what the page is about.

There are plenty of Royalty Free image repositories available online so you don’t really have any excuses not to use good images.

Whatever you do, do not just copy images from other websites… You would be surprised how many times I see this on customer websites. Give credit to image owners where required – even images covered under Creative Commons where attribution is required.

A final word around images. Infographics can be a great link magnet to your content. A fresh quality infographic has the ability to go viral in relevant markets but make sure its unique and not just a copy, unless of course you create something far better.

Having a very visual page helps with user engagement, social shares and overall length of time on page. Throw in a few good videos and watch the links and traffic flow in…

5. Internal Linking

There are a few main objectives behind internal linking to your own content and I still see a lot of great websites that fail to do this.

When a Google spider or some other creepy crawly comes to your site and starts to scan through your page you can help it along by showing it where to go. If it hits a page with just content it will scan that and then off it goes. But if it hits a page with multiple internal links it will scan the original content but also scan through the additional linked pages, thus increasing your chances of gaining traffic via organic search – if your content is good enough.

You can also use ‘relevant’ keywords to link to your own content. Avoid using too many similar anchor terms though or you might get a kick from the big G.

When a user hits your page you can direct them to other areas of your website that may provide value to them as a reader. This is a great way to keep a reader on your website for longer and gives you more opportunity to convert them into a subscriber or perhaps even a customer.

You can use higher ranking pages to direct potential customers to other pages that you may struggle to rank because of competition. Saves you lots of time and energy in trying to outrank sites that you haven’t a hope of beating…

I am a 33 year old husband, father of 3, engineer and a huge fan of developing systems to build useful and profitable websites. The reason I build online businesses is to provide financial independence for my family and yours AND so I can spend time outside skiing and biking with my family.